Last week,
I wrote about the importance of having a mailing list, and my attempts to set
one. If you read the post, you learned that it didn’t exactly go smoothly. I
have better news this week: I have a brand new mailing list and newsletter. How
did I do it? Well, let me tell you. After the celebratory fireworks.
I changed
the provider. That’s how. I wasn’t intelligent enough to figure out MailChimp’s
system so I gave up. I chose YMLP, Your Mail List Provider,
instead. Their instructions were easier to understand and they had the feature
I couldn’t find with the other provider, a possibility to set an automatic newsletter that is sent to every
new subscriber. Since I want to reward my subscribers with a short story when
they sign in, it’s an invaluable feature.
YMLP’s
subscription forms were more basic and they didn’t require as much tweaking.
Their templates were more flexible too. However, the autoresponder e-mail had a
different editor than the other templates; it wasn’t as easy to use and had
fewer formatting options. For example, it didn’t have options for setting
hyperlink styles. I had to tamper directly with the HTML code and even then
some style commands didn’t take. Therefore, the resulting e-mail has a couple
of eyesores in it.
But that
doesn’t matter. The important thing is that the task is done and I have a
mailing list. You can subscribe to it with this link or the form on the side
column. Every subscriber gets a free short story with the welcome newsletter.
Subsequent letters will have previews from my books and other news. If you
subscribe, please let me know if there are any technical problems, so that I can improve the newsletter. Thank you for subscribing!
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